Winter Camp

With much planning and finalizing of Winter camp details still to do, we had to quickly put our trip up north behind us. The week between


Thanksgiving and the first weekend in Decemeber was pretty hectic. It included unpaking and doing laundry, inventory at camp, cleaning, shopping, repacking, organizing, ordering, calling, emailing, calling and emailing again, fixing, reorganizing, reordering, and finally actually getting everone to camp. It was a lot. It seemed impossible and out of control, but God had everything all worked out!

The Winter Camp theme is based on the book by Robert Munger, My Heart, Christ's Home. It is about taking inventory of the rooms in our heart, making it a home for Christ and allowing Him to run it. The analogy is of each room in a house representing different areas of our life that need or should be surrendered to Christ. We are only able to cover some of the rooms over the course of a weekend. The book is great if you are looking for a good read. We were somewhat concerned that the material might be too deep for the campers, and to a degree it is. We saw the counselors bring it to the level that the campers could understand. It seemed to work well. Those who wanted to go deep could and others chose to not go deep at all. The topics reached different campers at different places. To wrap up the weekend, the campers could sign the Title Deed of their heart over to Christ if they wanted to. We saw some actually take it seriously and surrender their lives and hearts to Christ. Please pray that they would want to have Christ be the center of all they do, on or off the mountain.

The snow was an added bonus for the weekend. We didn't have a lot of it but enough to make snow-sculptures and have a few sledding times. We hope to get more snow for future camps.

We are excited for the holidays and being with family and friends again. We hope and pray your Christmas season is blessed and full of Christ's love.

Thanksgiving with Family

Our trip up north was nice.  The kids slept most of the drive as planned.  When they were awake, they were  easily able to enterain themselves. 

We enjoyed a nice trip to Tilden Park on Sunday.  It is an amazing park, almost similar to Irvine Park, but on a hillside. It was super cold and overcast.  It seemed as if the sky would open any second and pour down buckets of rain on us, but it didn't.We road the train and visited the farm.  The kids had a blast!

We had a family bowling outting!  That was fun! John was the ultimate winner, but we all had a good time. Even Charlie and Gracie gave it a try.

                                                                           

Thanksgving was a special time of traditions.  We enjoyed preparing the foods, setting a beautiful table, had a little family walk and a fun movie together!  As you can see, Gracie was the master chef for our meal!  

We played cards until the wee hours many nights, had fun playing with the kids and tried to get some family pictures.

Thank you to all who prayed for our trip.  We traveled well, no one got hurt or real sick.  We were glad to come home and we were pleasantly surprised to come home to snow.  It has been freezing here, but I guess that is what winter is all about!  Winter camp has started and we are enjoying being with the campers again.  We will get some updates for you about that soon.  Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!